Awards and Honors
- Times Mirror Distinguished Fellow, Huntington Library
-
American Philosophical Society
- American Council of Learned Societies
- National Endowment for the Humanities
- Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
- Texas Institute of Letters
- The American Antiquarian Society; Danforth Associate
- New Cove
- Mexican Academy of History
- Society of American Historians
- Western History Association, President
- Conference of U.S.-Mexico Historians,
President
- Real Orden de Isabel la Católica, Spain
- Aguila Azteca, Mexico
- American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Vice President, Professional Division, American
Historical Association
Selected Books and Essays
-
Fiasco: George
Clinton Gardner's Correspondence from the
U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, 1849-1854, with Jane
Lenz Elder , SMU Press, 2010.
-
Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment,
Yale University Press, 2005
- The Spanish Frontier in North America, Yale University Press, 1992
- Richard H. Kern: Expeditionary Artist in the Far Southwest, 1848-1853, University of New Mexico Press & the Amon Carter Museum, 1985
- The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico ,University of New Mexico Press, l982
- Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans, University of New Mexico Press, 1973
- The Taos Trappers: The Fur Trade in the Far Southwest, 1540-1846,
University of Oklahoma Press, 1971
Professor David Weber specialized in the history of Latin America and the American Southwest.
He has written or edited 22 books, most of them focusing on frontiers—places where cultures meet.
His early work looked at the ways that Anglo-American trappers and traders accommodated to or clashed with Mexicans in northern Mexico before the U.S.-Mexico War.
After publishing three edited volumes of first-hand accounts related to cultural encounters of the fur trade, Weber published The Taos Trappers (‘71, in print for over thirty years) and more recently, The Californios vs. Jedediah Smith: A New Cache of Documents (‘90), and On the Edge of Empire: The Taos Hacienda of Los Martínez (‘96).
Weber edited a pioneering volume in the neglected field of Mexican-American history, Foreigners in Their Native Land: The Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (‘73). His selection of
documents showed Mexican-American accommodations to Anglo-American society, how they resisted, or fell victim to it. Still widely used in classrooms, the book was re-issued in a special 30th anniversary edition in 2003.
Weber wrote a major history of the American Southwest when it belonged to Mexico, looking at the ways that Mexico sought to populate and develop the region from California to Texas, and to defend it from Indians and Anglo Americans. That book, The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico (‘82) changes the way we view America’s western frontier in the early 19th century, for it makes readers see the American West as the Mexican North.
The Spanish Frontier in North America (‘92)
treats three centuries of Spanish efforts to explore and colonize the Indian-held lands that are today the United States Sunbelt, from California to Florida. He argues that our nation’s colonial past extended beyond the English colonies, and that the full picture should include San Francisco, Santa Fe, and St. Augustine as well as Jamestown and Plymouth.
In 2004, Weber completed a decade-long study of the
frontiers of the Spanish empire, from Tierra del Fuego
to Alaska. Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment
appeared in 2005, published by Yale University Press.
Together with Jane Elder, Weber edited a collection of letters from the United States-Mexican boundary survey of 1849-1853. The unpublished letters, numbering over 100, came from SMU’s own DeGolyer library, and shed light on the beginnings of our contentious 1800-mile border with Mexico.
[Page updated July 2011]
|
